Kids Are Kids—Until They Commit Crimes

READING SELECTIONS

Kids Are Kids--Until They Commit Crimes

By Marjie Lundstrom Sacramento Bee, March 1, 2001

1

A week from now, a judge in Florida will decide how old Lionel Tate really is.

2

Never mind that he is indisputably twelve at the time of "the incident." Is he a

boy? Or a man?

3

It is a vexing question these days for the under-eighteen crowd, the group we

routinely write off as "only kids." It's why they can't smoke, or drink, or go to

R movies without our OK. It's why they don't vote. It's why they have curfews.

It's why we fret over their Internet access and fuss about driving privileges.

4

Hey, they're only kids.

5

That is, until they foul up. Until they commit crimes. And the bigger the crime,

the more eager we are to call them adults.

6

It's a glaring inconsistency that's getting more glaring by the hour as children

as young as twelve and thirteen are being charged as adults in America's

courts.

7

A California appeals court recently stuck its nose into the quandary of when

to charge young offenders as adults, returning that power to judges, not

prosecutors.

8

Meanwhile, in Texas, a lawmaker has had it. You want to throw the adult book

at kids? Fine, says Democratic state Rep. Ron Wilson of Houston.

9

Lower the voting age to fourteen.

10 And really, in light of things, how wacky is that? Today we are witness to criminal defendants--facing life sentences without parole--who cannot shave, still play with fire trucks and love to act out scenes from television or video games.

11 On March 9, Lionel Tate--who was twelve when he savagely beat to death a six-year-old girl--will likely learn if he must spend life in prison after his lawyer unsuccessfully tried to put pro wrestling on trial. Now fourteen and convicted as an adult of first-degree murder, Tate supposedly was imitating his World Wrestling Federation heroes when he pummeled his playmate, less than a third his size.

12 Last month in Sacramento, a fifteen-year-old Yuba City youth who reportedly claimed he was mimicking a TV program about little girls who rob a bank was given a 26-years-to-life prison term. Tried as an adult, Thomas A. Preciado was fourteen when he stabbed to death a minimart clerk.

13 In April, Court TV will air live daily coverage of the trial of Nathaniel Brazill, now fourteen, charged as an adult with first-degree murder. Brazill was thirteen and already in trouble for throwing water balloons when he returned to his Lake Worth, Fla., middle school and shot to death an English teacher, who would not let him say good-bye to two girls on the final day of classes.

CSU EXPOSITORY READING AND WRITING COURSE | SEMESTER TWO

JUVENILE JUSTICE | 45

14 This is not to say that the boys' crimes were not heinous, or that they should go unpunished. No one's talking about coddling here. But the zeal to corral wildly troubled, ever-younger kids and ram them through the adult system belies everything the juvenile justice system is all about: that kids are different. Their reasoning is not fully developed.

15 They are not adults.

16 "We've created this image that teenagers are something to be feared," said Dan Macallair of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco.

17 This warped vision of America's youth was given an unfortunate boost with the recent arrest of two seemingly "good kids" in the brutal slayings of two Dartmouth College professors. Before they were even arrested, prosecutors had charged the teenagers, sixteen and seventeen, as adults.

18 Trouble is, statistics don't bear out the hysteria. While politicians and prosecutors press for hard-line stands against youthful offenders--nearly every state has moved to make it easier to charge kids as adults--juvenile crime is way down.

19 The nation's juvenile arrest rate for murder fell 68 percent from 1993 to 1999, hitting its lowest level since 1966, according to the Justice Department. The juvenile arrest rate for violent crime overall fell 36 percent from 1994 to 1999.

20 Macallair believes the excitable media have perpetuated and fueled the youthviolence scare of the 1980s. In fact, California voters were so persuaded by tough-on-crime rhetoric they passed Proposition 21 last March, shifting the power from judges to prosecutors in deciding which juveniles to charge as adults in certain crimes.

21 Sensibly, the 4th District Court of Appeals in San Diego disagreed, finding that the provision violated the separation-of-powers principle. The San Diego district attorney has vowed to appeal.

22 But the fact remains, politics and demagoguery do not make good public policy. Research suggests that adolescents squeezed through the adult system are more likely to come out as violent career criminals than similar kids handled on the juvenile side.

23 More lives, lost.

24 So what, then, to do about Lionel Tate--a kid who apparently still doesn't understand that "pile-driving" fellow inmates is not a good thing?

25 In another week, he will find out who tucks him in at night. And where.

READING SELECTIONS

46 | JUVENILE JUSTICE

CSU EXPOSITORY READING AND WRITING COURSE | SEMESTER TWO

READING SELECTIONS

Startling Finds on Teenage Brains

By Paul Thompson Sacramento Bee, Friday, May 25, 2001

1

Emotions ran high at the trial of Nathaniel Brazill in West Palm Beach, Fla., two

weeks ago. Friends of slain teacher Barry Grunow called for the death penalty,

while a growing crowd of demonstrators outside the courthouse wielded

hastily written placards reading, "A child is not a man." Jurors returned with

their verdict May 16: Fourteen-year-old Brazill, charged in last May's shooting

of middle-school teacher Grunow, was found guilty of second-degree murder.

2

A Florida grand jury had previously ruled that Brazill, who frequently looked

dazed during the trial, would be tried as an adult, and if he had been convicted

of first-degree murder he would have faced life in prison without parole.

But Brazill's immaturity was evident throughout this incident--from the act

itself of Brazill's shooting a teacher he considered one of his favorites, to his

subsequent inability to give a reason for doing so, to the various quizzical looks

that came across his face as the verdicts were read.

3

In terms of cognitive development, as research on the human brain has

shown, Brazill--and any other young teen--is far from adulthood.

4

Over the last several years, as school shootings have seemed to occur

with disturbing frequency, startling discoveries have emerged about the

teenage brain. The White House held a televised conference on adolescent

development in May of last year, and a flurry of papers on the teen brain has

appeared in top science journals. Reporters and teen advocates ask: Do the

studies help explain the impulsive, erratic behavior of teens? The biggest

surprise in recent teen-brain research is the finding that a massive loss of brain

tissue occurs in the teen years.

5

Specifically, my own research group at the University of California, Los

Angeles, and our colleagues at the National Institutes of Health have

developed technology to map the patterns of brain growth in individual children

and teenagers. With repeated brain scans of kids from three to twenty, we

pieced together "movies" showing how brains grow and change.

6

Some changes make perfect sense: Language systems grow furiously until

age twelve and then stop, coinciding with the time when children learn foreign

languages fastest. Mathematical brain systems grow little until puberty,

corresponding with the observation that kids have difficulty with abstract

concepts before then. Basically, the brain is like a puzzle, and growth is fastest

in the exact parts the kids need to learn skills at different times. So far, all well

and good.

7

But what really caught our eye was a massive loss of brain tissue that occurs

in the teenage years. The loss was like a wildfire, and you could see it in every

teenager. Gray matter, which brain researchers believe supports all our thinking

and emotions, is purged at a rate of 1 percent to 2 percent a year during this

period. Stranger still, brain cells and connections are only being lost in the

areas controlling impulses, risk-taking, and self-control. These frontal lobes,

which inhibit our violent passions, rash actions, and regulate our emotions, are

vastly immature throughout the teenage years.

CSU EXPOSITORY READING AND WRITING COURSE | SEMESTER TWO

JUVENILE JUSTICE | 47

8

The implications are tantalizing. Brazill was only thirteen when he committed

his crime. He said he made a "stupid mistake," but prosecutors argued that by

bringing a gun to school he planned the crime.

9

Does "planning" mean the same thing for a thirteen-year-old, with his

diminished capacity for controlling erratic behavior, as it means for an adult?

The verdict, in this case, seems to line up with the research. The jurors, by

returning a verdict of second-degree murder instead of first, indicated that they

believe Brazill's actions, while not accidental, were not fully thoughtout, either.

10 Linking this maelstrom of normal brain change with legal or moral accountability is tough: Even though normal teens are experiencing a wildfire of tissue loss in their brains, that does not remove their accountability. What is clear from the research is that the parts of the frontal lobes that inhibit reckless actions restructure themselves with startling speed in the teen years. Given this delicate--and drastic--reshaping of the brain, teens need all the help they can get to steer their development onto the right path.

11 While research on brain-tissue loss can help us to understand teens better, it cannot be used to excuse their violent or homicidal behavior. But it can be used as evidence that teenagers are not yet adults, and the legal system shouldn't treat them as such.

Paul Thompson is an assistant professor of neurology at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine.

READING SELECTIONS

48 | JUVENILE JUSTICE

CSU EXPOSITORY READING AND WRITING COURSE | SEMESTER TWO

READING SELECTIONS

On Punishment and Teen Killers

By Jennifer Jenkins Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, Aug 2, 2011

1

"Some persons will shun crime even if we do nothing to deter them, while

others will seek it out even if we do everything to reform them. Wicked people

exist. Nothing avails except to set them apart from innocent people."

-- James Q. Wilson, Harvard Professor and Crime Expert

2

My youngest sister was the joy of our close family. When a teenager murdered

her and her husband in 1990 in suburban Chicago, she was pregnant with

their first child. She begged for the life of her unborn child as he shot her. He

reported to a friend, who testified at his trial, about his "thrill kill" that he just

wanted to "see what it would feel like to shoot someone."

3

This offender is now serving three life sentences in the Illinois Department of

Corrections. According to Charles Stimson, a leading expert in criminal law at

the Heritage Foundation's Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, he is one of

1,300 cases nationally of a teen killer sentenced as an adult to life, sometimes

called JLWOP (Juvenile Life without Parole).

4

There are advocates who wish to minimize these offenders' culpability simply

because of their age. As a high school teacher, I have worked lovingly with

teens all my life and I understand how hard it is to accept the reality that a 16

or 17 year old is capable of forming such requisite criminal intent.

5

We in America have to own this particular problem, with weapons so easily

available to our youth, and the violence-loving culture in which we raise them.

The Innuit people of northern Canada had no juvenile crime at all until 1980 and

the introduction of television into their culture.

6

Both sides in the debate about JLWOP agree: Teens are being tried as adults

and sentenced to prison for murder at alarming rates in the United States. But

this actually disproves juvenile advocates' reliance on the "underdeveloped

brain" argument. If brain development were the reason, then teens would kill

at roughly the same rates all over the world. They do not. Advocates often

repeat, but truly misunderstand brain research on this issue. The actual science

does not, according to experts such as Professor Stephen Morse, and others,

in any way negate criminal culpability.

7

The offender in our case was a serial killer in the making. He came from

privilege. Whenever he got in trouble, his parents fixed it. After a series of

other crimes, he planned the murders for months, carefully and privately. He

did not act on impulse or because of peer pressure. He was not mentally

disabled--in fact was quite intelligent. But he got a rush out of breaking the

law and ultimately started work on his other plan for mass murder at a local

bank. Bragging to friends led to his arrest.

8

There are no words adequate to describe what this kind of traumatic loss does

to a victim's family. So few who work on the juvenile offender side can truly

understand what the victims of their crimes sometimes go through. Some

never recover.

CSU EXPOSITORY READING AND WRITING COURSE | SEMESTER TWO

JUVENILE JUSTICE | 49

 ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download